Word: phrasings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...inimitable NASA phrase, everything seemed to be going A-O.K. As Columbia circled the earth for the third time, with no problem in view, Astronaut Owen Garriott and his West German sidekick Ulf Merbold floated gracefully toward the rear of the main cabin. They reached out and tugged at a hatch that would lead them to the shuttle's cargo bay. To their surprise, despite several minutes of huffing and pulling, the door refused to budge. Not until the muscle power of the entire six-man crew, the largest group ever to fly in space, was applied...
...botanical information (the intricate unfolding of shagbark hickory buds), historical oddities (the Midwestern pioneers who used large, hollow sycamores as barns or even dwellings), homely anecdotes (the willow posts in a neighbor's fence that took root and grew into a row of trees), and vivid turns of phrase (the black spruce needles that grow all around the twig "like the hair on the tail of an angry cat"). Borland's concern for conservation is all the more effective for its understatement, as when he quietly notes that the scientist who measured the age of a California bristlecone...
Meanwhile, Soviet Delegate Pavlichenko was escalating the Soviet threat that deployment would trigger an INF walkout and military "countermeasures." He hinted darkly that there might be new Soviet weapons in "Cuba and other Central American countries," a phrase that at the time could only mean Nicaragua. "How would you Like to have missiles there?" he asked. Other members of the Soviet negotiating team were issuing more credible threats: an increase in the number of SS-20s, the deployment of new shorter-range missiles in Eastern Europe, bringing submarines equipped with cruise missiles and low-flying "depressed-trajectory" ballistic missiles near...
Nitze had concluded that neither side could budge on the central issues without running the risk that the other side would, in his phrase, "pocket the concessions," and keep pressing for more. His answer was a comprehensive agreement containing compromises on all the essential problems. It would be presented to both governments for their consideration. He had learned from experience that it would be impossible to get formal approval in advance from Washington for all the necessary tradeoffs. But he figured that he might be able to hammer out an agreement with Kvitsinsky on his own. If successful? the resulting...
...finest in the collection. She takes Herman Melville's novella. "Bartleby the Scrivener", and dissects it as a verbal tour de force. Bartleby speaks only 37 times in a story of 16,000 words concerning himself, and each time he speaks he does so in a variation of the phrase "I would prefer not to." Hardwick convincingly equates Bartleby's character with the modern New Yorker; his footlessness is the predecessor...